Open to Interpretation
by Madhumalati
Summary: Why Doumeki thinks Watanuki's words are untrustworthy, and the quality of his lunches so important. Shounenai, kinda. Also rambly.


_**Open to Interpretation**_

A/N: my first xxxHOLiC fanfic! Well.

It didn't take Doumeki very long to discover that Watanuki hates thanking people. Oh, he's terribly polite with all the little things – effusive, even – but when it comes to thanking them for something important, he never quite gets around to saying it; stutters and freezes and yells and flails rather than just saying two simple words.

Then again, with Watanuki, actions always speak louder than words.

For example, there's the fact that his lunches always taste good.

Watanuki's a perfectionist, of course. It would be a blow to his pride – that damnable, adorable, pigheaded pride – to make something less than good. Still, the boy goes to ridiculous lengths to make a point sometimes.

And it would be easy, Doumeki knows, to make the lunches taste average, to put less than his whole heart into every single dish – or even to claim ignorance of the foods Doumeki requests. But those lunches are far, far better than anything else he has ever eaten, because whether Watanuki knows it or not, he puts his thanks and his apologies (as well as his reluctant brand of friendship) into the food.

For all his flailing and protesting and other windmill-like behaviour and his frequent I DON"T TAKE ORDERS, Watanuki always makes him lunch, and always eats it with him. Always has, since the time he caught him on the roof and wouldn't let go. The first time, it was a sort of guilty recompense, one that Doumeki hadn't even asked for – he has his own reasons for wanting Watanuki alive, which the idiot is completely unaware of – but it's become something suspiciously like habit.

He's not the kind of person who can be alone, who can survive without caring or being cared for. And in some strange fashion, he draws the oddest people to him in a sort of second family: Yuuko, Kunogi, Mokona, even Doumeki himself. It's something Kunogi doesn't understand, but Doumeki does, and so does Yuuko. He draws strength from them all, in different ways, and the easiest way for him to repay that is to work for them, feed them, because even though he can out-screech a factory siren with the eloquence of an orator he's utterly incompetent at dealing with any kind of emotion; this is the easiest way for him to say what he feels.

In his own warp-brained way, Watanuki Kimihiro practices the concept of equivalent exchange very precisely indeed.

It's almost funny, really. He's always found it ridiculously exaggerated when characters in movies exclaim that they'd rather die than be saved by so-and-so, but Watanuki is living proof that pride really is greater than self-preservation. He'd rather die than be helped by him, and Doumeki should probably feel insulted, but he finds it cute. And incredibly stupid, but mostly cute.

This, he knows, is probably a sign of incipient madness on his part, but the best parts of Watanuki are marked OFF LIMITS, even to the ever-oblivious Himawari-chan, and so he teases him and manipulates him because he'll take as much of Watanuki as he can if he can't have it all, and if he can't have a sincere smile a sincere scream will also do; and Watanuki quivering with rage is a pretty sight indeed.

Yelling, Doumeki knows, keeps Watanuki alive. It's the only way he knows to keep people close, to reassure himself that he has relationships strong enough to take teasing and fights and fretting in their stride. So he lets him work out his frustrations on him, because he can see how necessary it is to Watanuki and he's always been terrible at denying him anything. Besides, he learnt early on that anything Watanuki says is open to interpretation and possibly utterly bullshit even if _he's_ the last one to understand that; in fact, he usually is.

Everyone has their faults.

So he protects Watanuki and sticks close and does his very best to irritate the living daylights out of him, because……

Because……

Because, he thinks wryly, Watanuki's lunches are always perfect, and actions _do_ speak louder – where both of them are concerned.


End file.
